Test renders of the day

Lighting and shaders did not go very well today - but I was tackling the most complex scene in my whole animation (or so goes my excuse).

The particles turned out super gross! I think I will have to use a linstep set-up to create a depth map for them. I haven't put hair on these lymphocytes yet and I think it's just sporting a purple lambert shader right now. But I did get the nerve impulse to work!

I decided to use sprites for the background with an animated lymphocyte with hair and a wobble deformer. But I couldn't get them to render properly with Maya hardware renderer so they don't exist yet in the above images... will have to work on that. Maya also decides to ignore IFF sequences that I rendered out of AE, so that's another roadblock for now!

Another thing to consider: may have to use Maya DoF - there's that inescapable AE Lens Blur halo effect.

Lesson learned: If SSS doesn't work after tweaking the numbers like crazy, try reversing the normals...